The Civil Rights Movement 1960-1980

"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of
Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former
slave owners will be able to sit down together at the
table of brotherhood."
-- Martin Luther King Jr., 1963

By 1960, the United States was on the verge of a major
social change. American society had always been more open
and fluid than that of the nations in most of the rest of
the world. Still, it had been dominated primarily by
old-stock, white males. During the 1960s, groups that
previously had been submerged or subordinate began more
forcefully and successfully to assert themselves: African
Americans, Native Americans, women, the white ethnic
offspring of the "new immigration," and Latinos. Much of
the support they received came from a young population
larger than ever, making its way through a college and
university system that was expanding at an unprecedented
pace. Frequently embracing "countercultural" life styles
and radical politics, many of the offspring of the World
War II generation emerged as advocates of a new America
characterized by a cultural and ethnic pluralism that their
parents often viewed with unease.

Thurgood Marshall, one of the champions of equal rights for all Americans. As a counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Marshall successfully argued the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court, which outlawed segregation in public schools. He later served a distinguished career as a justice of the Supreme Court.(Ebony Magazine)

The struggle of African Americans for equality reached its
peak in the mid-1960s. After progressive victories in the
1950s, African Americans became even more committed to
nonviolent direct action. Groups like the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), made up of
African-American clergy, and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), composed of younger
activists, sought reform through peaceful confrontation.

In 1960 African-American college students sat down at a
segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in North Carolina and
refused to leave. Their sit-in captured media attention and
led to similar demonstrations throughout the South. The
next year, civil rights workers organized "freedom rides,"
in which African Americans and whites boarded buses heading
south toward segregated terminals, where confrontations
might capture media attention and lead to change.

They also organized rallies, the largest of which was the
"March on Washington" in 1963. More than 200,000 people
gathered in the nation's capital to demonstrate their
commitment to equality for all. The high point of a day of
songs and speeches came with the address of Martin Luther
King Jr., who had emerged as the preeminent spokesman for
civil rights. "I have a dream that one day on the red
hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of
former slave owners will be able to sit down together at
the table of brotherhood," King proclaimed. Each time
he used the refrain "I have a dream," the crowd roared.

The level of progress initially achieved did not match the
rhetoric of the civil rights movement. President Kennedy
was initially reluctant to press white Southerners for
support on civil rights because he needed their votes on
other issues. Events, driven by African Americans
themselves, forced his hand. When James Meredith was denied
admission to the University of Mississippi in 1962 because
of his race, Kennedy sent federal troops to uphold the law.
After protests aimed at the desegregation of Birmingham,
Alabama, prompted a violent response by the police, he sent
Congress a new civil rights bill mandating the integration
of public places. Not even the March on Washington,
however, could extricate the measure from a congressional
committee, where it was still bottled up when Kennedy was
assassinated in 1963.

Martin Luther King Jr. escorts children to a previously all-white public school in Grenada, Mississippi, in 1966. Although school segregation was outlawed in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of the Supreme Court in 1954, it took decades of protest, political pressure, and additional court decisions to enforce school desegregation across the country.(AP/WWP)

President Lyndon B. Johnson was more successful. Displaying
negotiating skills he had so frequently employed during his
years as Senate majority leader, Johnson persuaded the
Senate to limit delaying tactics preventing a final vote on
the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed
discrimination in all public accommodations. The next
year's Voting Rights Act of 1965 authorized the federal
government to register voters where local officials had
prevented African Americans from doing so. By 1968 a
million African Americans were registered in the deep
South. Nationwide, the number of African-American elected
officials increased substantially. In 1968, the Congress
passed legislation banning discrimination in housing.

Once unleashed, however, the civil rights revolution
produced leaders impatient with both the pace of change and
the goal of channeling African Americans into mainstream
white society. Malcolm X, an eloquent activist, was the
most prominent figure arguing for African-American
separation from the white race. Stokely Carmichael, a
student leader, became similarly disillusioned by the
notions of nonviolence and interracial cooperation. He
popularized the slogan "black power," to be achieved by
"whatever means necessary," in the words of Malcolm X.

Violence accompanied militant calls for reform. Riots broke
out in several big cities in 1966 and 1967. In the spring
of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. fell before an assassin's
bullet. Several months later, Senator Robert Kennedy, a
spokesman for the disadvantaged, an opponent of the Vietnam
War, and the brother of the slain president, met the same
fate. To many these two assassinations marked the end of an
era of innocence and idealism. The growing militancy on the
left, coupled with an inevitable conservative backlash,
opened a rift in the nation's psyche that took years to
heal.

By then, however, a civil rights movement supported by
court decisions, congressional enactments, and federal
administrative regulations was irreversibly woven into the
fabric of American life. The major issues were about
implementation of equality and access, not about the
legality of segregation or disenfranchisement. The
arguments of the 1970s and thereafter were over matters
such as busing children out of their neighborhoods to
achieve racial balance in metropolitan schools or about the
use of "affirmative action." These policies and programs
were viewed by some as active measures to ensure equal
opportunity, as in education and employment, and by others
as reverse discrimination.

The courts worked their way through these problems with
decisions that were often inconsistent. In the meantime,
the steady march of African Americans into the ranks of the
middle-class and once largely white suburbs quietly
reflected a profound demographic change.